Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic

by Raymond M. Weaver

For four months Melville was held in friendly captivity by the Typees. His swollen leg was healed by native doctors—but not without prolonged pain and anxiety—he was fed, he was amused, he was lionised by the valley. His hosts were savages; they were idolaters, they were inhuman beasts who licked their lips over the roasted thighs of their enemies; and at the same time they were crowned with flowers, sometimes exquisite in beauty, courteous in manners, and engaged all day long in doing not only what they enjoyed doing, but what, so far as Melville could judge, they had every right to enjoy doing. With Toby, Melville was consigned to the household of Kory-Kory. Kory-Kory, though a tried servitor and faithful valet, was, Melville admits, in his shavings and tattoos, a hideous object to look upon—covered all over with fish, fowl, and monster, like an illustrated copy of Goldsmith’s Animated Nature. Kory-Kory’s father, Marheyo, a retired gentleman of gigantic frame, was an eccentric old fellow, who seems to have been governed by no fixed principles whatever. He employed the greater part of his time in throwing up a little shed just outside the house, tinkering away at it endlessly, without ever appearing to make any perceptible advance. He would eat, sleep, potter about, with fine contempt for the proprieties of time or place. “Frequently he might have been seen taking a nap in the sun at noonday, or a bath in the stream at midnight. Once I beheld him eighty feet from the ground, in the tuft of a cocoanut tree, smoking, and often I saw him standing up to the waist in water, engaged in plucking out the stray hairs of his beard, using a piece of mussel-shell for tweezers. I remember in particular his having a choice pair of ear-ornaments, fabricated from the teeth of some sea-monster. These he would alternately wear and take off at least fifty times in the course of a day, going and coming from his little hut on each occasion with all the tranquillity imaginable. Sometimes slipping them through the slits in his ears, he would seize his spear and go stalking beneath the shadows of the neighbouring groves, as if about to give a hostile meeting to some cannibal knight. But he would soon return again, and hiding his weapon under the projecting eaves of the house, and rolling his clumsy trinkets carefully in a piece of tappa, would resume his more pacific operations as quietly as if he had never interrupted them.”

Kory-Kory’s mother was, so Melville reports, the only industrious person in all the valley of Typee: “bustling about the house like a country landlady at an unexpected arrival: forever giving the young girls tasks to perform, which the little huzzies as often neglected; poking into every corner, and rummaging over bundles of old tappa, or making a prodigious clatter among the calabashes. She could not have employed herself more actively had she been left an exceedingly muscular and destitute widow, with an inordinate supply of young children, in the bleakest part of the civilised world.” Yet was hers withal the kindliest heart imaginable. “Warm indeed,” Melville says, “are my remembrances of the dear, good, affectionate old Tinor!”

There also belonged to the household, three young men, “dissipated, good-for-nothing, roystering blades of savages,” and several girls. Of these, Melville has immortalised Fayaway, his most constant companion. He has anatomised her charms in the manner of his first Fragment from a Writing-Desk. But it is Fayaway in action, not Fayaway in still life, that survives in the imagination. At Melville’s intercession, the taboo against women entering a boat was lifted. Many hours they spent together swimming, or floating in the canoe: diversions heightened in their heinousness by the fact that Fayaway for the most part clung to the primitive and summer garb of Eden—and the costume became her. Nor did Melville’s depravity cease with his unblushing approval of nakedness. “Strange as it may seem,” Melville writes in the ’40’s, “there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the act of smoking.” Fayaway not only smoked,—but she smoked a pipe, as they drifted in the canoe. One day, as they were gliding along, Fayaway “seemed all at once to be struck with a happy idea. With a wild exclamation of delight, she disengaged from her person the ample robe of tappa which was knotted over her shoulder (for the purpose of shielding her from the sun), and spreading it out like a sail, stood erect with upraised arms in the head of the canoe. We American sailors pride ourselves upon our straight clean spars, but a prettier mast than Fayaway made was never shipped aboard of any craft.” John La Farge has painted Fayaway in this attitude.

And the occupation of Toby during all this? Soon after their arrival, Toby had been despatched to Nukuheva under pretence of procuring relief for Melville’s swollen leg, actually to facilitate his and Melville’s escape. Toby never again returned to Typee. He had been treacherously beguiled on board a whaler, unable to escape until he left his vessel at New Zealand. “After some further adventures,” says Melville in The Story of Toby, written in July, 1846, ten days after the two men discovered each other’s existence through the instrumentality of Typee, and published as a “sequel” to that novel, “Toby arrived home in less than two years after leaving the Marquesas.”

While Melville had the companionship of Toby in Typee, he was even then eager to get back to civilisation. That savagery was good for savages he never wearied of contending. But despite the idyllic delights of Typee—an idyll with a sombre background, however—Melville was never tempted to resign himself to its vacant animal felicity. Melville, unlike Baudelaire and Whitman, was not stirred by the advantages of “living with the animals.” While among them, he evinced a desire neither to adopt their ways, nor to change them. He made them pop-guns, he astonished them by exhibiting the miracle of sewing. He tried to teach them to box. “As not one of the natives had soul enough in him to stand up like a man, and allow me to hammer away at him, for my own personal satisfaction and that of the king, I was necessitated to fight with an imaginary enemy, whom I invariably made to knock under to my superior prowess.”

Among the bachelors of the Ti, the men’s club of the valley, he chatted, he smoked, he drowsed: he witnessed the Feast of the Calabashes when, for the livelong day “the drums sounded, the priests chanted, and the multitude roared and feasted”—a scene reminiscent of a University whole-heartedly given over to “campus activity.” A mock battle was staged for his diversion. He entered the funeral fastnesses where the effigies of former heroes eternally paddled canoes adorned by the skulls of their enemies. He mused by pools, splashing with laughing bronze nymphs. Yet withal, Melville was a captive in the valley. His lameness, too, returned. His hosts began to make friendly but insistent suggestions that he be tattooed—a suggestion superlatively repugnant to him. He heard, moreover, the clamour of a cannibal feast, and lifted the cover of a tub under which lay a fresh human skeleton. Under these circumstances he taught old Marheyo two English words: Home and Mother. But he did not complete the trinity. Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit. It was time for him to depart.

One profoundly silent noon, as Melville lay lame and miserable under Kory-Kory’s roof, Mow-Mow, the one-eyed chief, appeared at the door, and leaning forward towards Melville, whispered: Toby pemi ena—“Toby has arrived.” That evening Mow-Mow’s dead body floated on the Pacific, a boat-hook having been mortally hurled at his throat. And it was Melville who hurled the boat-hook.

An Australian whaler, touching at the harbour of Nukuheva, had been informed of Melville’s detention in Typee. Desirous of adding to his crew, the Captain had sailed round thither, and “hove to” off the mouth of the bay. Chary of the man-eating propensities of the Typees, the Captain sent in a boat-load of taboo natives from the other harbour, with an interpreter at their head, to procure Melville’s release. Accompanied by a throng of armed natives, Melville was carried down to the shore—being too lame to walk the distance. A gun and an extravagant bounty of powder and calico were offered for Melville’s release: but this bounty was clamorously and indignantly rejected. Karakoee, the head of the ransoming party, was menaced by furious gestures, and forced out into the sea, up to his waist in the surf. Blows were struck, wounds were given, and blood flowed. In the excitement of the fray, Melville was left to the guardianship of Marheyo, Kory-Kory, and Fayaway. Throwing to these three the articles that had been brought for his ransom, Melville bounded into the boat which was in immediate readiness to pull off towards the ship. It was not until the boat was about fifty yards from the shore that the savages recovered from their astonishment at Melville’s alacrity in escape. Then Mow-Mow and six or seven warriors rushed into the sea and hurled their javelins at the retreating boat—and some of the weapons passed as close as was desirable. The wind was freshening every minute, and was right in the teeth of the retreating party. Karakoee, who was steering the boat, gave many a look towards a jutting point of the bay they had to pass. When they came within a hundred yards of the point, the savages on the shore dashed into the water, swimming out towards the boat: and by the time Melville’s party reached the headland, the savages were spread right across the boat’s course. The rowers got out their knives and held them ready between their teeth. Melville seized the boat-hook. Mow-Mow, with his tomahawk between his teeth, was nearest to the boat, ready the next instant to seize one of the oars. “Even at the moment I felt horror at the act I was to commit; but it was no time for pity or compunction, and with a true aim, and exerting all my strength, I dashed the boat-hook at him. I struck him below the throat, and forced him downward.” Mow-Mow’s body arose in the wake of the boat, but not to attack again. Another savage seized the gunwale, but the knives of the rowers so mauled his wrists, that before many moments the boat was past all the Typees, and in safety. In the closing tableau, Melville fell fainting into the arms of Karakoee.

Though later, when Melville was a sailor in the United States Navy, he touched at the Marquesas, he never again set foot within the valley of Typee. Melville had known the Typees in their uncorrupted glory—strong, wicked, laughter-loving and clean. Mr. O’Brien visited Typee not many years ago, to find it pathetically fallen from its high estate. “I found myself,” he says, “in a loneliness indescribable and terrible. No sound but that of a waterfall at a distance parted the sombre silence.... Humanity was not so much absent as gone, and a feeling of doom and death was in the motionless air, which lay like a weight, upon leaf and flower. The thin, sharp buzzing of the nonos was incessant.” Mr. O’Brien discovered in the heart of the valley fewer than a dozen people who sat within the houses by cocoanut-husk fires, the acrid smoke of which daunted the nonos. “They have clung to their lonely paepaes despite their poverty of numbers and the ferocity of the nonos. They had clearings with cocoanuts and breadfruits, but they cared no longer to cultivate them, preferring rather to sit sadly in the curling fumes and dream of the past. One old man read aloud the Gospel of St. John in Marquesan, and the others listlessly listened, seeming to drink in little comfort from the verses, which he recited in the chanting monotone of their uta.... Nine miles in length is Typee, from a glorious cataract that leaps over the dark buttress wall where the mountain bounds the valley, to the blazing beach. And in all this extent of marvellously rich land, there are now this wretched dozen natives, too old or listless to gather their own food.”

Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!